art & writing in the deep south

Southern Courier Photographs @ ADAH

The Southern Courier, a weekly newspaper published by a biracial staff in Montgomery from 1965 until 1968, featured the daily lives of African-American people in Alabama to show people the true image of these people to help “erase the injustices of segregation and prejudice.” It showed news that the mainstream media did not cover. Among the Southern Courier‘s photos of different towns and neighborhoods, many were taken by James H. “Jim” Peppler, a native of Philadelphia.

Peppler’s Southern Courier collection is now available through the Alabama Department of Archives & History. Peppler took 11,000 photos over his three years with the Southern Courier and has given the negatives to the Alabama’s Archives to “protect the material and make it easily available to those he photographed.”

The pictures, which are split between everyday life and the civil rights movement, also show “grassroots civil rights efforts” in small towns that are not as notable. The collections has benefited not just researchers but also the people who are in those photographs, as it is a part of their history.